Month: May 2014

In any mixed group of people of different nationalities it is only a matter of time and drinks until the token American will be asked to shed light upon the aspects of his homeland that foreigners find the most baffling. This is eminently fair; payback, if you will, for all of the times a group of Americans have asked the one Japanese person if everyone eats sushi every day and does karate, or the German is asked to defend his fatherland's somewhat checkered history since…
buy cipro online buy cipro no prescription

Charlemagne, I guess.

The last time I visited Canada, a group of people explained to me why the U.S. healthcare system is idiotic as though this had not yet occurred to me, and that if only I brought back to America an explanation of our faulty logic we could finally fix the broken system. In my more recent experience abroad the topics were not quite as esoteric. Three times in a single week, though, I was asked to explain why everyone in America carries a gun.

It is hard to explain U.S. gun culture to a non-American. Especially as an outsider. Six capirinhas in, I cleared my throat and prepared to break new ground in advancing understanding among peoples.

First – and in any conversation about guns you really, really owe it to your audience to hammer this point home at the outset – the percentage of Americans who own guns is actually declining. Our country has more guns – nearly 300 million – than ever before yet the share of households that own a gun has fallen steadily during this Gun Boom (see what I did there). Simply put, everyone in America does not have a gun. America has a relatively small, possibly even shrinking, number of people who each own a large and growing number of guns. It's a bimodal distribution (note: do not explain it this way to normal people) with peaks at Zero Guns and Shitload of Guns.

So the first thing to understand about American gun culture is that you're either in or you're out. And if you're in, you are all in. Go big or go home, son. Back to this point in a minute.
online pharmacy ventolin best drugstore for you

The second thing to try to communicate is that unlike most nations, we do have firearm ownership written into our Constitution. What this means is that individuals have a right to own a gun. It does not mean, despite what the NRA has successfully argued, that one has a right to own any and all types of guns or to do with those guns whatever one's heart desires. The 2nd Amendment may tell us we can be armed, but it does not establish your right to own a .50 cal heavy machine gun and to carry it (supposing you could) into a Federal courthouse. This, I tried to explain, is where the left and right diverge.

Increasingly, though, the "no restrictions or regulations of any kind ever because freedom" argument has become the status quo. This is due almost singly to the relentless work of the NRA. Foreigners know "NRA" when they hear it but often do not know what it is. It is an interest group, and easily the most consistently successful one, I said.
online pharmacy lipitor best drugstore for you

At this juncture my own ignorance was a roadblock, because I do not know much about how interest groups function in other democracies despite knowing a good deal about interest groups in the U.S. In most other political systems corruption and influence-peddling tend to be a little more brash, unvarnished, and Mafiaesque (think Russia, for example). In the U.S., however, with its pretensions of a free, transparent, and equitable democratic system requires the going through of many motions. Interest groups and elected officials must engage in these ritualized war dances and secret handshakes and coded oaths to arrange political exchanges with the facade of plausible deniability. Why no, my supplemental rule on that bill had nothing to do with the $100,000 campaign donation I received. It was a mere coincidence.

Any moderately politically interested foreigner grasps this readily. What might not be obvious, though, is the NRA's grand illusion – the Big Lie that it is a group that represents firearm owners. On paper and in mission statement this may be true. In practice, the NRA represents gun manufacturers. In furtherance of the gun industry's desire to sell a fuckton of guns to the declining percentage of Americans who own guns and who happen to already own a fuckton of them, the NRA must constantly fan the flames of fear that They are coming to Take Your Guns. Never mind that Congress hasn't passed a consequential restriction on gun ownership since the Great Depression. The impending threat looms large that Obama and Clinton and Liberal Judges and Saul Alinsky and the tree huggers and Ed Begley and the Comintern are always coming to take them away imminently so the only logical thing for a freedom loving Patriot to do is rush out and buy, buy, buy. Get them now while you still can, fellow Minutemen!

Are people really so stupid that they fall for this ruse? And fall for it repeatedly?

Well, yes. I ask by way of answering, "Have you ever been to Florida? Go to Florida sometime. Walk into a chain buffet restaurant at 3 PM on a weekday and start talking to people about guns.
buy ivermectin online buy ivermectin no prescription

Or about anything, really. And that this kind of cheap hucksterism works will no longer be a mystery. Watch Fox News for 15 minutes, remind yourself that an appreciable minority of Americans take it seriously, and suddenly the NRA Theory doesn't seem so far fetched.

"So to answer your question, we don't all have guns. In fact Canada has more guns per capita than we do. I guess our gun owners are just…dumber? More malleable, if we're being polite? Anyway," I said, scanning for a valid target to redirect this line of questioning and finding two erudite German backpackers, "don't you all wear leiderhosen? And where do you hide all the Nazi gold?"

Recently the media were collectively wise enough to republish a college freshman's op-ed in a student newspaper because history has proven that 19 year old white kids usually have the most important and interesting things to say. A monstrously ugly child named Tal Fortgang, which I pause to remind you I did not make up, went from the typical Princeton freshman to a guest on major news networks overnight. OK, so it helps if you're telling them what they want to hear. But say the right things and you too can go from masturbation enthusiast to Hannity guest in the blink of an eye, teens!

Fortgang has become the planet's leading authority on white privilege, which is remarkable given that he does not appear to have the slightest idea what the phrase means. His opus is basically the typical "Several generations ago my family was pretty poor, therefore I deserve what I have" argument that is second only to drunken copulation in popularity on college campuses.

Perhaps it’s the privilege my grandfather and his brother had to flee their home as teenagers when the Nazis invaded Poland, leaving their mother and five younger siblings behind, running and running until they reached a Displaced Persons camp in Siberia, where they would do years of hard labor in the bitter cold until World War II ended…Or maybe it’s the privilege my grandmother had of spending weeks upon weeks on a death march through Polish forests in subzero temperatures, one of just a handful to survive, only to be put in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where she would have died but for the Allied forces who liberated her and helped her regain her health when her weight dwindled to barely 80 pounds.

Perhaps my privilege is that those two resilient individuals came to America with no money and no English, obtained citizenship, learned the language and met each other; that my grandfather started a humble wicker basket business with nothing but long hours, an idea, and an iron will—to paraphrase the man I never met: “I escaped Hitler. Some business troubles are going to ruin me?”

Tal, I think I finally get it. White privilege is a sham. Let me share a bit of my own story to drive home your point.

My grandfather was a humble turd miner, digging in the hard, feculent ground for 18 hours every day across the fertile turd deposits of eastern Poland. Every day he walked uphill several miles to work, and then because of the way the planet rotates he also had to walk uphill to get back home. He and his wife, who cleaned toilets with her tongue because she could not afford a brush, lived under a bridge and had nine children, none of whom survived. Every day they ate a single bean cut into quarters, half for breakfast and half for dinner. They also had a dog who was poor.

That was my father's family.

On my mother's side, my grandfather licked the mosses off of damp rocks for sustenance when he was forced off of his land by the Potato Famine and also by Hitler. Then he fought Hitler and his Nazis and beat them even though he was so poor that his rifle had no barrel because he had to pawn it for a potato.
buy Pepcid generic rxbuyonlinewithoutprescriptionrx.net over the counter

This brave man beat up Hitler with a rifle that, when you think about it, was really just a piece of wood. Then he met and married my grandmother who was dancing for pennies in the poorest part of Latvia. They realized that in Latvia there was no freedom because of Hitler and communism, so they came to the United States and humbly opened a very humble business making low-grade solid lubricants from rendered street children. It was arduous work since almost to a child, the children resisted being reduced to grease. While they slept they made extra money by doing the whole town's laundry. They never complained about what hard work it was.

All of my grandparents worked hard and sent their children to Harvard Yale State, where they studied hard and got degrees in American Values.

They had two children while they were in college and never once asked for any help, which may partially explain why my sister disappeared from the yard one day in 1983.

I grew up to be a strong, hard working, respectful lad who knows a few things about life such as when it is not worth it to chase after a van that has just kidnapped your sister.

Why should I have to apologize for anything? Isn't being poor and understanding the value of hard work transmitted genetically, after all? As long as I am the descendant of some people who were not rich assholes, it is impossible for me to be a rich, privileged asshole.

QED.